Rogen talks Hornet!

Our man ‘Sturdy’ was hanging out with funnyguy Seth Rogen on the set of his upcoming madcap mall-cop comedy OBSERVE AND REPORT, and (gently) squeezed him for a bit of info on his planned movie of pulp character THE GREEN HORNET.

Rogen had quite a bit to offer. In regards to the silence since the project was announced last summer, he says “It’s more about finishing a final draft of the script and the timing of these things. You might hear something soon.”

And he’s not sweating budget: “We don’t think about the money at all. When we’re writing a script, the only way we can do it is to just write exactly what it is we would want to see. When we wrote PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, we did not know whether it was going to be a $100 million or a $27 million. Ultimately it was a 27 million dollar movie, but that didn’t affect the way we wrote it. It was more going in after and taking things out but ultimately we did all the action we wanted in that. That being said, this seems like it would be more in the 70-100 million dollar world. But again, we just write these things thinking like what movie do we want to go see? What would we throw down our money for? What trailer would we watch and we’d say say ‘that’s the f*cking movie I’m running to, that’s the movie I’m standing in line for right now’? Those are the movies we want to make.”

Certainly a step in the right direction, but if Rogen is putting on the mask to the newspaper owner who fights crime in his spare time, who does he want doing the grunt work as loyal sidekick/headkicker Kato? As previously rumored, he’s got an eye on Hong Kong superstar Stephen Chow (SHAOLIN SOCCER and KUNG FU HUSTLE). “Until you get an official green light, the studio won’t spend any money. It’s hard to get an actor without any money. Yeah, we would love to have him. The version of the script that ultimately we’ve written is a very intense action movie, but the relationship between the Green Hornet and Kato, a lot of comedy comes from that. So at first we weren’t even sure going in whether or not it could be more of a Jet Li type of guy who maybe isn’t the funniest guy in the world, but is physically very impressive, or whether it would be more of a Steven Chow type guy who can do martial arts but clearly has a sense of humor on him. And in the version we’ve made, it seems like a Steven Chow type guy would be more suitable for the role.”

And how will the dynamic between the hero and his chopsockey comrade work? “It’s them sharing the action, but I would say the story has something to do with them working out their relationship exactly. It’s kind of your quintessential story about a hero and his sidekick and that’s what really initially drew us to it. We always thought that was a funny dynamic and a funny relationship and no movie’s really did that except BATMAN AND ROBIN [/sarcasm]. No movies did that well. It’s something that for years me and Evan [Goldberg, co-writer] have been toying with this notion of a movie that really kind of explores the hero-sidekick relationship. What is a hero without a sidekick? What is a sidekick without a hero? It’s actually a dynamic that applies to many real life situations; a lot of working dynamics, a lot of bosses and their underlings and stuff like that. That’s what really initially drew us to it. One thing people say when you say Green Hornet is Bruce Lee and Kato. [Green Hornet] is the only hero whose sidekick is more well known than he is.”

Kevin Smith previously picked up the property to direct, and then put it down again. So who might be getting into the director’s chair now? Rogen and Goldberg are actively seeking a qualified party. “We’ve been meeting with people from both sides, both worlds I would say. That ultimately is the real question: do you get a guy who does action really well and has done that before, do you get a guy who’s never done action but can bring something unique to that style movie? We don’t know yet. Until we get the script out to people, we’re kind of letting their responses to what we write be the dictator. Someone will read it and be more psyched than the other guys and that will be the guy we go with.”

Either way, it’ll probably be another year or two before we see a masked Rogen on the screen saving damsels and throwing knuckle sandwiches.